Restaurant Redux - Crunchy Shrimp & Avocado Salad Stack

Here we have a take on one of the dishes we enjoyed during our trip to Maine this summer - a stack of avocado & shrimp, served on a bed of seaweed salad and crispy puffed rice paper wrappers.



This is a lousy picture, but you can get the gist of the seafood & avocado stack. We decided to forgo the Marie Rose dressing that accompanied the original from The Burning Tree and downgrade from lobster to shrimp.



We don't have a clue when it comes to making seaweed salad, so we picked this up at the sushi place Gaja Gaja on South...tasted great - perfect balance of crunch and chew with sesame oil throughout



Avocados getting sliced for the stack.



This was the 'fun' element...if you drop pieces of the rice paper into hot oil, they will puff up like vermicelli or a pork skin, creating a light and crispy cracker.


Tthe shrimp in Maine seemed to be smaller in general, so we bought something in the 30-40 range; butter poached and peeled, they were OK, but looking back we probably should have chopped them a bit, mixed in some diced avocado and placed them on the crisps to marry the flavors a little tighter.

Restaurant Redux - Crispy Kale & Clams

Here's the original dish I enjoyed during our trip to Maine - what I remember most was how the tasty bitterness of the kale and played into the buttery bitterness of the pine nuts and the clam broth. The crispy leaves soaked up the broth, making for a rich & deep flavor.

I like the presentation as well...it conjured up an image of the seafloor with the clams resting gently on a bed of seaweed in one of the tidal pools along the rocky coastlines we had walked across.



Pan-roasting the pine nuts here...these will burn in a instant if you're not careful.




We took the stalk off the kale leaves and washed them thoroughly. With a rough chop, the leaves were dressed with a little oilive oil, sea salt & pepper before being laid out on a baking sheet. They went into a 350 degree oven for 15-20 minutes, turning them over halfway through and making sure they didn't burn.

We picked up some little neck clams...the cherrystones were just humongous, so we opted for the small shells. Here they are resting in a bowl of ice cold water in the hopes of cleaning out any sand that may be inside the shells still.

Elizbeth brought home the New Portuguese Table last week and in a nod to the classic pork-shellfish combo of that cuisine, we braised and seared a link of Linguiça, a milder seasoned sausage with paprika and having a slight sweetness hinted in the spices.



The clams were steamed, then added to the bowl with the sausage, pine nuts and goat cheese crumbles. I strained the broth that the calms had cooked in to remove any sand or shell bits, adding a little butter and salt for taste.



Finally we poured the broth over the mix, liberally sprinkled with the oven-crisped kale leaves, and dug in. A few of the clams still had a bit of sand in the shell, which was a bummer, but the overall effect was close to the original, with the kale, pine nuts and broth combing forces to create that bitter, nutty & buttery flavor.

Burning Tree Restaurant - Otter Creek Maine

Located just outside Bar Harbor, the Burning Tree restaurant was located in what used to be a residential house and was surrounded by greenhouses and raised flower beds...a promise of locally grown produce to appear on the menu.



The friends we were visiting suggested we get two orders of these seafood fritters - golf-ball sized deep crispy fried nuggets of a scallop mousse studded with shrimp



The Kale & Clams starter suggested the natural surrounding of the seafloor that these clams could be found in - the kale was oven-crisped and resting above a shallow broth of clam liquor, pine nuts and goat cheese.

Elizabeth's Avocado & Lobster Stack (camera setting blurred this accidentally) was resting on a rice-paper crisp , deep fried puffed spring roll wrappers, and lightly dressed with a Marie Rose-style sauce.

The Bouillabaisse was a saffron-infused mix of shellfish & chunks of monkfish.

The Burning Tree building was surrounded by raised flower beds overflowing with late summer blooms. Several of the edible blooms appeared on our dining plates - orange nasturtium & cumin carrots were the side dish that evening.